Sometimes My Nights Got Brighter
by TriedItAtHome
Summary: He wonders exactly when his brain went from "Alex: the Best Friend" to "Alex: the Woman I Love" because it's certainly new to him. (Cafe!AU)


It takes him thirteen months and probably over a thousand cups of coffee to realize it.

The day is a Sunday. Alex has Michael running the cafe - they haven't heard a bomb go off or sirens racing towards the building so she assumes it must be going alright.

Birkhoff and Alex are stretched out on her couch at opposite ends, their legs crossed over each other's at the middle and their backs leaning against the arm rests. Birkhoff is scrunched down with his laptop on his chest and his arms pulled up to type enough so that he looks like a hobbit, and every once in a while Alex will look up from _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ (which she is somehow finding interesting) to laugh at him before going back to reading.

She tilts her head to look at the sideways clock hanging on the wall, and noticing the time makes her more hungry. She shuts Hemingway carefully and knocks her foot against his knee, startling him into looking up at her.

"Grilled cheese?"

"Yes please," he croaks, then coughs to clear his throat. "Yes."

"You could sit up to, you know, prevent that. Also, just as a side not, if you make one stupid comment about women and kitchens and sandwiches, I will personally gut you like a fish and use your intestines in my next fruitcake."

"Nobody likes fruitcake." She glares at him. "Alex, I honestly wasn't even thinking about it. And that is terrifying, that you would use my intestines."

"That was the point. So no comments." She stands and heads for the kitchen, calling out behind her, "American is all I have, so American's what you're getting."

He shakes his head then stretches his neck to tell her otherwise: "There's Accasciato and Smoked Chevre in the fridge!"

"I've never bought fancy cheese in my life, Sy, why would I start now?"

"You didn't, but boy oh boy did I!" he says, finally sitting up. "One _can_ get tired of too much American."

She appears in the doorway between them, holding the block of Chevre in her hand, saying "You're impossible!" and before disappearing again and he wonders exactly when his brain went from _Alex: the Best Friend_ to _Alex: the Woman I Love_ because it's certainly new to him.

/

The day they met is one they both remember separately, because it was only about seven minutes of their day but the best seven minutes out of 1,440 for both of them.

Alex had been showing a new employee the ropes, and really all that meant was making sure he knew how to make coffee and wash dishes and how to handle a robbery - yes, that had come up before. Of course, nothing in Cafe Diem ever went so simply as it should, and somehow Sean was lying on the linoleum in a sea of trampled biscotti crumbs.

The bell above the door rang and in walked Birkhoff, a new face she had never seen before, so she left Sean on the floor to take her new customer's order. A small espresso and a biscotti, he'd asked for, to which she'd glared at the floor behind her and replied that they were all out. He did not question this (perhaps thought she was a little bit crazy), but ordered the carrot cake instead. It was delicious, as it turned out, and the cafe became his favorite place in the city - they say first impressions are the worst, after all.

Sean quit a week after the incident, went to work for an IT company across the way but still came by at lunch.

Things there were far more normal after that.

/

"You know," he hears from the kitchen, but he does not look up, "if you're going to buy cheese for yourself and keep it in my apartment, you could do us both a favour and get _actual groceries_ when you go out."

"What, cheese isn't an actual grocery?"

"Well, yes, but you're not going to eat solely cheese for the rest of your life, are you?"

He scoffs, and knows she hears it. "Oh, no. There'll definitely be Red Bull, too."

/

She learned his name, in the first month. Seymour Birkhoff. That was about it - the extent of what she knew of him from their brief conversations was his name, and if she were being honest it infuriated her.

But she watched him get closer to her group of friends, or rather watched _them_ get closer to _him_ because it seemed he was not one to seek out social interaction, but welcomed it when it came. Really, he seemed surprised that these people took a liking to him despite his fantastic personality flaws. Oh yes, Alex noticed those.

(She also noticed his nerdy shirts and his fantastic little sometimes-smile and his tight jeans and his hands and his stubble and his hair… sometimes she told herself that the flaws stood out more but really the nice things were a much longer list.)

Sonya was the one who surprised her the most. She was a loyal customer who had been coming here almost as long as the cafe had been running. Alex would not particularly consider them friends, but perhaps friendly acquaintances.

As he was ordering one day, Birkhoff had asked Alex who the woman in the corner was.

Alex had smirked at first, then smiled widely when she realized he was genuinely curious, that not an ounce of his usual egocentrism showed.

"Her name's Sonya. She works with your company, you know, I'm surprised you haven't met her."

Birkhoff nodded, but did not say anything, and as the decades-old register took it's sweet time ringing up his order, she watched him watch Sonya and thought that maybe they'd be cute together, even if it caused a little twist in her gut that she did not understand.

"You should talk to her. I think you'd like her."

He huffed a laugh that bounced his shoulders, taking his coffee from her hands carefully - she found she had not noticed the sides had left her palms red and stinging and blistered.

"You shouldn't play matchmaker, darling," he said, dropping his change in the tip jar. "It doesn't suit you."

He walked away and her next customer was Ryan, who was regular enough that he didn't have to tell her the order before she started fetching his mocha latte and lemon pound cake. As she reached around in the display case, through the glass she could see Birkhoff introduce himself, then gesture, then pull out the chair opposite Sonya and she felt that twist again but also she was happy for them both, even with how little she knew either of them.

Ryan did not ask her why it took so long to get the pound cake.

/

She's singing, in the kitchen.

There's this old antique radio she has from God-knows-what century, and he hadn't noticed when she'd turned it on but now she is singing and he decides her voice is his paradise, even better than her carrot cake. He does not know the song, but it sounds very distinctly Motown (everybody knows Motown when they hear it) and he'll have to look it up because now it's a new favorite.

He remembers her telling him once that she didn't sing often in front of people, and in talking with Nikita he'd learned that she'd only ever heard Alex sing once before. He is honored and humbled and in complete bliss.

" _In that case I don't want no part, I do believe that that would only break my heart…_ "

She hits a high note, and her voice cracks, but she carries on as though it hadn't and he firmly believes he might be special.

" _Oh, but if you feel like lovin' me, if you got the notion, I second that emotion…_ "

/

It was raining outside, in the distance there was thunder rumbling, and oh God there was not a day in her life she had ever enjoyed the rain. It made her ache down to her bones.

The cafe was closed, and the clouds made something dark and cold and dreary out of what would have been a pleasantly sunny summer evening and she hated it.

There was a thud like a truck being thrown against the window that came quite literally out of nowhere, and she hurtled back so fast that she and her chair toppled to the ground.

It was Birkhoff.

Of fucking course it was Birkhoff.

She stood up, picking her chair from the ground and placing it back at the table, then went to the door where he had his hands pressed flat against the glass to frame his dripping, pitiful face.

"You're wet," is all she said when she opened the door, but leaned against the frame to block his entry just yet.

"No, no, I hadn't noticed."

Really, she wasn't in the mood for his sarcasm and really, he wasn't in the mood for her grumpiness, so she let him inside… there may have been some flaw in her logic there.

"We're closed, you know, and you're dripping on my floor."

"Yes, yes, that I _had_ noticed," he replied.

She flicked on the lights - his nose and cheeks and fingers were red and his lips were blue and he was shuddering like a leaf. She softened, telling herself it was only out of pity.

"Some hot chocolate? Coffee? Tea?" she asked.

"Hot cocoa sounds good, thanks."

She went round the counter to make it, and he put his elbows on the marble with his face in his palms, waiting. She did not look at him, and he did not look at her, and he did not thank her when she set a hot mug in front of him.

"You're welcome," she said at the same time that he blurted out, "I broke up with Sonya."

Their wide eyes met through the thin, billowing cloud of steam between them. His were the first to look away.

"Why?" she asked. "You two seemed good together."

 _Not quite good enough._

He shrugged first, figuring out his words. "It was… We weren't really… It just wasn't working out."

"And here you are, soaking wet and dripping on my floor, drinking hot chocolate with a woman you barely know."

He takes a slow sip. "Well, you do make some very good hot cocoa."

She laughed, forcefully, cheesily, and at the time he didn't know her well enough not to buy it. They talked well into the night in the bright light of the cafe, arguing mostly, while yellow headlights cast dancing shadows on the window through the rain.

/

Birkhoff finally gets bored of staring blankly at his computer screen, so he stretches until his back pops and wanders into the kitchen.

"Hey, we have some sweet potato fries to go with that," he says. Wave after wave of melting cheese scent rolls over him.

"Since when?"

"I dropped them in the fridge last time I ate at the burger place downtown," he replies. Watching her rhythmically slice up a tomato. "Friday's, I think it's called. It's new, we should go try it out later in the week."

He goes to the fridge to pull them out, and she sighs behind him.

"At this point I might as well just get you your own fridge. You're over here more that at your own place, anyways."

The oven beeps in protest when he presses END instead of BAKE too many times after closing the door on the fries.

"Hey now. Without my additions, you'd probably by starved by now, or something. You _never_ get your own food."

"Ha!" she laughs. "And just how do you think I survived before you came along?"

"You didn't. You did not live before I walked into your coffee shop."

He screams (yes, screams) when she flings a tomato slice at him. They both end up laughing, though, and the bottom of the grilled cheese burns but he doesn't think even burning could make her food taste bad.

"Just go back to the couch, Sy, you're distracting me!" she huffs with the biggest smile on her face he's ever seen.

"Sorry, Alex, I simply can't help it if you find me too attractive to work in your own kitchen while I'm nearb- AH!"

She throws a slice of provolone at him this time, makes a bullseye on his face.

/

"Alex," Nikita said to her, "you could stand to make nice with him. Talk like you're friends."

The cafe was celebrating it's eight-year anniversary, and Michael's birthday along with it. The staff as well as many of the regulars had gathered at the bar on Mulberry Street after closing, and the night had _started out_ fun. There were few opportunities for Alex to get either Nikita or Michael drunk, but so far the results had been more draining than entertaining. Both of them had come up to pester her at the bar about the earlier argument with Birkhoff. She'd told both of them to kindly fuck off, that she'd rather be alone to drown in self-loathing and to watch him lick his wounds away by chatting up some pretty girl at the other end of the bar.

(There wasn't a drop of alcohol in her and the sight still made her sick.)

"We're not friends. We've never been friends," she replied, and hated herself a second later for spitting out the word.

"No," Nikita said, that older and wiser air drawn about her even in a drunken stupor, "you both want something more than that, and you're too dense to realize that you're on exactly the same page all the time. You just both prefer to fight it out and ignore it for the greater good. Or something. Michael's pretty, don't you think?"

"I don't know how I'm supposed to be around him," Alex admitted quietly, presently ignoring Nikita's trail-off.

"Well, as a first step, you could try just to _be around him_ ," Nikita told her, and then she was gone, off to do terrible drunken things against Michael that Alex wished she could bleach from her brain.

/

"So I heard Michael's finally gonna pop the question tonight. While they're out to dinner."

Birkhoff scoffs at Alex's words, his fingers moving rapidly over the keyboard now that he's found something worth fighting over email about with a coworker.

"I'd believe it if he hadn't been telling me the same thing for weeks," he says.

Alex hangs the dishtowel dangling from her hands around her neck, and goes back to the grilled cheese.

"Even Nikita's getting fed up with it. She told me if he didn't manage to get it out tonight, she was just going to do it for him."

" _She's_ also been saying that for weeks, you know," Birkhoff replies. Alex only laughs.

/

"You've never been anywhere? In the whole seven months that you've lived here, you've never managed to make it outside of here, your office, your house, and the Hibachi place?"

All Birkhoff wanted were directions to the hardware store to pick up supplies for his boss, but instead had ended up getting into yet another argument with Alex, this time defending his perfectly good reasons for never having to go anywhere but inside the three-block perimeter that his entire day fit into.

"I go to the grocery sometimes, too," he snapped, harsher than he meant to.

"You mean the Harris Teeter which is _right next to your office_?"

He suddenly didn't feel bad about his harshness anymore, not with the offensive testiness in her tone.

"Hey now, I just said you missed somewhere, not that it was outside my comfort blocks."

"Your comfort blocks," she muttered, shaking her head and ringing up his triple-fudge-espresso brownie to go. "Tell you what, as soon as I'm done here, I'll take you around town, show you the sights, and the best burger places and the bars. Sound like a plan?"

She handed his order and change to him in a bag, and he dropped the coins in the tip jar.

"Okay sure, but can I get directions to the hardware store?"

He didn't realize he'd agreed to her proposition until she showed up outside his office at the end of the day, hooked her elbow in his, and started walking.

/

"Not much longer now," Alex calls.

Seymour Birkhoff has never in his life imagined that something so huge as realizing he's in love would feel so simple. But he sees her standing there in her kitchen, absently playing with her necklace while she flips a hot grilled cheese over on the stove and her hair tangled into knots and her shirt baggy hanging on thin shoulders…

Somewhere along the line, over all those cups of coffee and the smiles and the walking to her apartment after work to watch old 80's movies, he must have known it would happen. Probably did.

And now here he is: the laziest of Sunday's spent in her apartment with grilled cheese and easy smiles and comfortable companionship. He wouldn't have it any other way, and _that's_ how he knows he's in love.

/

So it became a tradition, that she would wait for him until work got out, they'd walk around the city, she'd pay for dinner because "Birkhoff, you pay me at the cafe every day, it's no big deal," and Alex's mind was not to be changed when it was made up.

Then it became lunch breaks while Nikita watched the cafe. Then after dinner, he'd walk her home. Then she invited him inside for a movie and ice cream after a bad day at work. Then he brought her a pint of mint chip that Saturday and _Drop Dead Fred_ was on so "Birkhoff, you wanna stay for a while?"

Their friendship was easier than they thought it would be, after the months before that had been spent arguing endlessly about nothing at all.

Soon, he didn't have to knock anymore and she was calling him _Seymour_ then _Sy_ and he sometimes called her _Princess_ and with anybody else she'd mind, but not him. Some nights Michael and Nikita started going with them to the bar on Mulberry, and when "some nights" turned into "most nights", Birkhoff became fond of making _How I Met Your Mother_ references whenever the four of them sat at their usual booth.

It was easy and uncomplicated between them, and something they could both live with so it stayed just as it was until one Sunday he was over at her apartment and she stopped reading to to make grilled cheese while threatening him, and he fell in love like it was the most natural progression in the world.

/

She turns off the stove and carries both plates out to the couch, then hands him the grilled cheese with one side burned.

"That's your own fault, so it's only fair that you get it."

He smiles, sets it on the coffee table without having to look. Then he leans over and kisses her, then she kisses him back, and she becomes _Alex: the Woman He Loves and Could Possible Love Him, Too_ in a fraction of a second.

"Mm, dinner can wait," she says, only a little more breathlessly than she'd like and just the amount of breathlessness he was hoping for.

"You? Wait for dinner? Why I never -"

"Watch it there, mister, I can rethink this whole thing."

He kisses her nose, which is possibly the cutest and most romantic gesture she think he's capable of doing (but she hopes he proves her wrong later).

"You wouldn't, Princess. Couldn't. We're inevitable."


End file.
